Inside the box - November, 2016

Welcome on the 4th "Inside box" article ✌️

This month was dedicated to the prerelease of the alpha version. We wished that we could deliver more but we have to deal with others things which tend to slow us. Despite this, we made good improvements and we can't wait to talk about them!

About the v3

Framework layer advancements

The framework is now able to support the dashboard. This is a big step for the project and we are pretty excited about that. Currently, the dashboard is pretty empty, and you can't do anything with it (see the related PR) but it can handle plugins, what is quite useful.

We are developing the first plugins, right now. We faced an important choice. We decided to have separated states stores for the plugins and the dashboard. This choice is not definitive and it could be revoked during the next weeks.

At this time, our main arguments are:

• Don't let a plugin access to others plugins stores (security issue)
• Simplify the development process of a plugin
• Have a standalone dashboard which only registers plugins

Don't hesitate to give your opinion about that! We would be very happy to talk about this choice to make the best decision for the project. You must be aware that having separate stores could increase the difficulty to share data (aka states) between plugins...

We also did few enhancements to simplify the contributions on Strapi (see the related PR). This is very important for us. Before, it was very complicated to help us because the workflow was not well designed. We didn't give any solution to easily install a development version of Strapi. This is all gone. By running a single command npm run setup or yarn setup, you're ready to contribute! 🎉

To do that, and for the future, we decided to use Lerna to manage our mono-repository as Babel, Jest and many others already do (see the related PR). If you don't know this project, you should definitely take a look!

Administration panel advancements

We released the very first version of the dashboard. We recognise that it's a little weird to release something that is empty and not ready yet. Our philosophy is to show to the community our progress on the new version. This was one of our previous mistakes, that's why we prefer merging on the master branch our WIP instead of working on a hidden branch.

Next steps

• Fix a random and recurrent Webpack's issue during the dashboard build.
• Develop the first three plugins (Custom Content Builder, Content Manager, Settings Manager).

How can I help you? Feel free to submit a PR or open an issue on GitHub. Send us an email at hi@strapi.io, if you need support or anything else, we will be glad to chat with you. Don’t hesitate to ping us on Slack.

Thanks for reading!